Back in the 25th century, Earth launched a generation ship into deep space, with the goal of establishing the first interstellar colony. It dropped out of contact and disappeared, never reaching its destination.
Thousands of years later, it has finally been found.
Analogue is not far from being a visual novel, since the meat of the game is reading text. You find and read logs from the years before the colonization ship became abandoned. You also communicate with the ship’s two AIs and you got to hear what they think about the log messages. All this is done through a very simple interface.
The game has a pretty interesting way of telling a story. Everything on the ship has already happend from your point of view, and through the logs that are uncovered through the game you get to know what happened aboard.
This game really requires patience from the player. It presents a lot of characters, all with Korean names to confuse you even more. Luckily there are two family tree images available in the game to help you a bit from getting totally lost. I actually wrote notes on my Nexus 7 tablet about all important characters and events as I read the logs, to make it easier for myself to keep them from blurring together and to better understand the timeline. In the end I managed to produce 2 A4 pages of notes in Google Docs.
It took me 8 hours to reach the end of the game, and an additional 2 hours to complete the remaining 4 possible endings, complete all achievements and find the few logs I had missed.
I enjoyed the game and I think it was a fun experience. However, I’m pretty sure it’s not something for everybody – you really have to be somebody who can appreciate slower “games”.
The game does also have a really good soundtrack, which is available on Spotify.
Analogue is available on Linux, Windows and Mac, and costs 10 €. There is also a trial version available on its website. However, I got the game in a Indie Royale bundle for 4 €.
A trailer for the game: